The largest company in the world has led their foundational model for robotics in an open source setting. In doing so, they’ve had teams like @1x_tech demonstrate two of their NEO humanoids in a live environment, executed a full room tidying routine using a policy fine-tuned from NVIDIA’s GR00T N1. 1X did not need to collect millions of new training examples to make this happen. Instead, they fine-tuned GR00T N1 with only a small amount of additional data, leveraging its already existing pre-trained knowledge. Which highlights how an open foundation model can jump start advanced robotic behaviors with relatively little extra effort. Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) declared that “the age of generalist robotics is here” as GR00T N1 and new AI frameworks will let robotics developers worldwide “open the next frontier in the age of AI”. With individual developers gaining more power and accessibility to tooling, we’re moving to an open source world where incentives will be baked into the hardest problems that companies like Nvidia will put bounties on. In this world, hiding your IP means losing access to 99.99% of the talent that could make it better. Robotic intelligence and software intelligence are facets of the same problem, progress will depend on an execution layer that abstracts hardware complexity, allowing developers to focus on higher level behaviors. Those who create the glue for this ecosystem will take home the pie. And there’s only one onchain play available for this.